One day in 1976, Professor Avril Henry, of the University of Exeter,
entered the town's cathedral to discover workmen repainting the medieval
bosses. Inspecting more closely, she was alarmed to find that the painters
were ruining the original art, introducing bright blobs of modern colours
and covering up the intricate details that had once graced the bosses.
The potential loss of centuries-old craftsmanship in the cathedral inspired
Professor Henry to initiate the Exeter Cathedral Keystones and Carvings
(ECKC) project. She first contacted the Cathedrals Advisory Commission,
as a result of which the professional restoration of the cathedral's artwork
was undertaken by the late Anna Hulbert, who worked in long-term collaboration
with Professor Henry in the ECKC project. Once the restoration had been
completed, Professor Henry wanted to publish photographs of the cathedral's
painting and sculptures, and the associated text they had both written,
in hard copy format. However, with over 1100 images (over 200 of which
were in colour) it was realised, a few years into the project, that traditional
publishing would prove too expensive. Various other forms of publication,
such as microfiche, were tested through the 1980s, but it was not until
the 1990s that, with technology having reached a sufficient standard,
a digital version of the Exeter Keystones and Carvings could be considered.
Even then, the project continued to struggle as publishing houses failed
to comprehend the complex requirements of such a scholarly undertaking.
Only following discussions, which commenced in 1999, with VADS (who host the final product), and the web designer
company Tell Communications, did Professor Henry ensure progress towards electronic publication
of the cathedral artwork.

While transferring from a printed to an electronic medium offers many
advantages, it also involves many new challenges. In composing a traditional
monograph, an academic's task is primarily devoted to supplying learned
text, whereas the digital project demands an awareness of legal, business,
technical and graphic issues. This article summarises the various tasks
that faced Professor Henry in managing the Exeter project.

Creating a Specification

During the course of 1990s, Professor Henry had contact with a number
of publishing houses, private firms offering digitisation services and
various academic departments. She hoped to be able to find the digital
expertise necessary to translate the photographs and text into an integrated
electronic whole. In many cases, however, these contacts were unable to
supply Professor Henry with the assistance she required. This was partially
a problem of technology - many publishing houses had still to grasp fully
the potential for electronic editions.

Finally, however, a local company was commissioned to digitise the photographs
of the Exeter art, and provide a sample of how the final project could
appear. The relationship between the ECKC project and the local firm was
a tortuous one. The unbelievably poor quality of the sample CD that they
produced, nowhere near the necessary standards, was symptomatic of this.
Concentrating on the cathedral's bosses (the painted carvings at the apex
of each vault) the sample CD-ROM had, amongst other faults, an interface
which allowed the user little freedom in choosing which text to read,
rather garish taste in its colouring scheme, and a serious lack of titles,
captions, documentation, and other devices to explain to the user what
position he or she was in. Figure 1 is a good example.

Figure 1 - A sample from an early CD-ROM

While the initiated might just grasp that this is a depiction of the
ceiling of Exeter Cathedral, the new user might not understand this -
there is, after all, no accompanying text to explain what the diagram
represents. Such an example illustrated that the company had next to no
knowledge of how academic material should be presented in electronic form.
There were additional problems: the company took several years to perform
the digitisation, and the firm went bankrupt before producing a satisfactory
CD-ROM.

Professor Henry faced similar problems when she attempted to run the
project inside academia. She hoped that various contacts would help enhance
the digitised pictures and produce both a website and CD-ROM that would
include the illustrations and their associated text. However, the outcome
was still not satisfactory. A lack of understanding meant that the product
was not suitable, especially with regard to the quality of the images
required. After the images had been enhanced they looked fine on screen,
but when accessed from the CD-ROM, they were 'squashed', with the bosses
appearing elliptical rather than circular.

Professor Henry realised that the project would never be accomplished
if she did not prepare her own detailed specification of how she wanted
the electronic publication to operate. This meant specifying the interface,
how text and image were to overlap and providing a sense of the graphics
to be used. It also meant acquiring a broad understanding of the technical
issues surrounding graphics - issues such as formats, file sizes, and
resolutions, which all effect how the images will appear to the user,
and therefore should be of concern to the project manager.

Initially, this was a tricky task; Professor Henry could find no standard
model or on-campus experience to help her construct a specification. However,
the earlier problems Professor Henry had with the reluctance of external
bodies to provide help and support were now disappearing. The ECKC was
finding help from knowledgeable individuals, such as Dr Dave Edmondson
of the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre in Plymouth.

Other Issues

Creating the specification was part of a larger set of skills that Professor
Henry had to acquire during the running of the project. It is common,
Professor Henry remarked, for academics involved in such projects to lack
the business and legal skills necessary to arrange contracts with external
bodies. Various business difficulties - bankrupt firms, slow delivery
times etc. - persuaded Professor Henry to learn more about business planning,
as well as to seek out specific help when arranging the financial and
legal aspects of contracts. For example during negotiations with VADS & Tell Communications, Professor Henry's business
knowledge has given her a clearer sense of what rights she wishes to retain.
Whilst retaining rights to original data, Professor Henry would like her
specification to be a template for other cathedrals in the country, so
that keystones, carvings and other cathedral art could be documented according
to a common formula.

Organising funding is a branch of project management familiar to all
academics. Much like traditional academic projects, money had to be raised
from funding bodies to assist during the preparation of the intellectual
content of the ECKC - but funding was also required to pay for technically
knowledgeable research assistants, the process of digitisation and interface
creation. Unfortunately, an unwarranted suspicion of the electronic medium
from both internal and external funding bodies made raising money during
the earlier parts of the project more difficult.1 However,
funding bodies are now less wary of the possibilities of electronic publication.
The Leverhulme Trust has been particularly helpful, having fully grasped
the technical and scholarly issues involved. This resulted in Professor
Henry being rewarded with a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, which paid
for the interface creation by Tell Communications.

Good financial judgement has also been required when negotiating with
the various publishers. Numerous factors (the number of photographs to
be published, their resolution, the complexity of the interface) all influenced
the possible costings, and therefore the scope of the final product.

Now that the project has been in existence for quite some time, Professor
Henry has also seen the importance of documenting its various stages.
Negotiations with other bodies are eased if information on the history
and contours of the project is easily available to them; indeed, Professor
Henry has often needed to refer back to earlier notes so as to try to
clarify certain issues in the project. Numerous details should be recorded
from precise technical specifications to the subtle shifts in the broad
vision of the project. Material that seems obvious and unforgettable to
project managers at their inception may not be so transparent a few years
down the line. This is a problem that is exacerbated by the inevitable
departure of staff who may work on a project for several years. With many
recent changes to the project in the last few years, Professor Henry has
been especially anxious to record the chronology of her project.

Figure 2 - An Exeter Cathedral boss representing the murder of Thomas
Becket. The black and white photograph was taken before the original
colouring was covered by the modern repainting

VADS - Disseminating the Project

Now that Internet delivery is becoming a more frequent mode of publication,
Professor Henry has profited from the support of specialists such as VADS and Tell Communications. Tell Communications,
Plymouth, were contracted to produce the resource to Professor
Henry's specification, with VADS providing the on-line delivery and archiving.

VADS' ability to deliver resources on the Internet will constitute for
Professor Henry an "invaluable contribution" to the Exeter Cathedral project.
The expertise
of VADS in preservation will allow for the continued accessibility of
the Exeter Cathedral material. Much of the history of Professor Henry's
project has been dogged by the accelerating pace of format technology
and the relative inability of many others to cope with this change. Attempts
to record the data on microfiche in the 1980s were dashed by the sudden
redundancy of the medium and the shortcomings of the firm involved. VADS'
knowledge of standards and open systems architecture offers the project
manager the opportunity to safeguard their data for the foreseeable future.
VADS also
fields user enquiries relating to its delivery and maintenance.

Nevertheless, technical consultants, such as VADS, are not there to
finalise details on behalf of those running digitisation projects, but
to provide guidance. Individual choices on a variety of issues do still
need to be made, and managers need to be aware of what those choices will
entail. For example, copyright, complex in this instance, has had to be
safeguarded. This is normally a particularly laborious task, but here
it has been made more difficult for Professor Henry by the long time span
(almost a quarter of a century) since the photographs were taken, by the
changing formats for delivery and by the untimely death, on 10 April 2000,
of Anna Hulbert. Professor Henry had originally organised copyright clearances
for distribution on CD-ROM but has had to reaffirm this now that the digitised
images are being distributed on the Internet. The latter has only been
made acceptable to copyright holders by Tell's use of an electronic "watermarking"
of each image.

Finally, the project manager must be present to ensure that the resource
is being implemented according to her design, in terms of both its production
and its subsequent delivery and archiving. While the 'technical' parties
involved have considerable expertise in matters of digitisation, they
still require Professor Henry's knowledge of medieval art and history
to ensure that the content is being created and delivered without error.
The creation of links between texts and images can be partly automated,
but verification of each link is essential.

The Exeter Cathedral Keystones and Carvings were available
on the VADS website from Spring 2001. For Professor Henry and her late
co-author it has been a long trek, branching down many unexpected routes,
whether they be legal, financial, or technical. To respond to these diverse
challenges and to exploit the opportunities presented by a disseminating
and archiving body such as VADS, and by the skills
of web-design experts like Tell Communications, Professor Henry has had
to become acquainted with a range of skills. Being aware of the need to
apply these skills is an integral part of running a successful digitisation
project.

Footnotes

1. The Association of Union Teachers website (http://www.aut.org.uk)
carried a press release relating to Exeter University's withdrawal
of funding from Professor Henry's project. According to the press release:
"The university withdrew the funding for her work when a change in the
timetable of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) meant that the work
would not be eligible for submission to the 2001 RAE because she would
have retired by then."